Daniel Crooks
Inter­sec­tion

Beyond the usu­al ver­nac­u­lar of video art, Daniel Crooks has devel­oped his own approach entire­ly. Absorb­ing influ­ences includ­ing the ear­ly sci­en­tif­ic pho­tog­ra­phy of Ead­weard Muy­bridge and Eti­enne Jules Marey (whose work inspired the sem­i­nal Nude descend­ing a stair­case, 1912 by Mar­cel Duchamp), Crooks has a deep under­stand­ing of how a work of art can express the expe­ri­en­tial val­ue of time.

The sub­jects of Daniel’s work; the recur­rence of city trans­port sys­tems, lifts in high-rise build­ings along­side images of the sea, invoke an idea of the world made as much of time as space and that indeed we our­selves are also made of time. (Wittgen­stein quipped that it is best to think of the self as a rope or string).

Crooks works, lit­er­al­ly, from inside the medi­um, decon­struct­ing its time-space matrix to reveal the inner truth about the sub­jects of video: they are pure­ly temporal.

The five works com­pris­ing Inter­sec­tion are all sourced from the same ​‘vol­ume’ of video footage. Each video is a for­mal vari­a­tion that nav­i­gates an alter­na­tive path through the same light field, push­ing its own ​‘pic­ture plane’ through that space along oppos­ing axes.

The two most fig­u­ra­tive videos nav­i­gate the entire vol­ume of footage – each swap­ping time for the ver­ti­cal or the hor­i­zon­tal. The sec­ond, more abstract­ed videos are reduced to hor­i­zon­tal and ver­ti­cal ​‘planes’.

The cen­tre work – a sin­gle pix­el of infor­ma­tion that tun­nels through time – is the inter­sec­tion between oppos­ing axes, almost like the ful­crum or nodal point, and in turn acts as a piv­ot for the installation.

These works declare that repro­duc­ing first glances won’t do: the great pow­er of art is to reveal truth through an aug­men­ta­tion of how the world appears.